I think a war between the sexes is a misleading perspective. Social life is a war between you and everyone else. Thankfully, the war is very developed (and thus polite) and is predominately over positive-sum opportunities (like, say, mates). But it's still a war.

(For example, many of the things that seem to be men vs. women turn out to primarily shift resources from one kind of men to another, or one kind of women to another. Monogamy vs. serial monogamy vs. polygamy is a great example; the policy of 'one husband one wife' has more impact on the husband side of the equation than the wife side. Fights against pornography, as far as I can tell, are a mostly internal conflict within women. Women serving in combat roles benefits female officers but hurts female enlisted. Not everything maps onto this neatly, but a surprising amount does.)

It also seems to me that, in general, a belief feeling low-status (instead of wrong) is a potent warning of bias. So I guess woo for LW?

Comment author: Gray 09 April 2011 12:27:36AM 3 points [-]

Good post, except I disagree with your first point. I think when you say that "social life is a war" but qualify that it's a polite war, and a positive-sum war, I think you're stretching the analogy to the point of breaking.

In my opinion, I think economics is the better model, if you look at social interaction as a sort of market, and people are trading back and forth. People don't like the idea of sex being a commodity, but in a very important sense, it is. Friendships and family are also commodities in this way. Acting out of duty corresponds, as I see it, as investing in your relationships with other people. There's always disutility in acting out of duty, but it's an important part of any relationship.

Comment author: cousin_it comment score below threshold [+] (31 children)

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 07 April 2011 04:40:37PM * 8 points [-]

You mean you didn't know that before? You have a sex, you have a side.

What do you mean? Given that your sex doesn't determine which side you're on in this conflict (that is, whether you wish to take the effort for improving status of females, which only applies to the extent and in the sense you believe there is a sufficiently uniform status difference, etc.), it doesn't give a simple heuristic rule for this decision. And without a simple reliable heuristic, it's a nontrivial problem to figure out your own position, and many people won't take the effort to solve it, and of those who did, many would pick a position in significant ignorance of the underlying facts, not even mentioning moral facts.

Comment author: cousin_it comment score below threshold [+] (18 children)

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 07 April 2011 05:17:32PM 6 points [-]

It's not that simple. For example if taking care about consent means that there's less sex, but also less drama and trauma among your associates, you might come out ahead.

Comment author: Marius 07 April 2011 05:36:53PM 7 points [-]

So if there's both males and females on sides A and B, what makes it a war between the sexes?

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 07 April 2011 05:02:17PM 6 points [-]

Your sex determines whether you benefit from side A winning, or from side B winning.

No. This sounds like you assume egoistic values, which are often incorrect. As a decision-maker, you benefit to the extent your decisions (in this case, goals about female status) are right. Which decisions are right in this situation is a nontrivial moral and factual question, on the moral question side particularly where egoistic motives can be in conflict with altruistic motives.

Comment author: cousin_it comment score below threshold [+] (6 children)

Comment author: JGWeissman 07 April 2011 05:50:37PM 8 points [-]

If you have anatomical feature X, and someone pushes a button to increase the utility of all people having feature X

This assumes some correlation between anatomical feature X and a term in a person's utility function.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 08 April 2011 01:31:25AM * 3 points [-]

Based on your comment and this exchange, it's not clear to anyone what exactly are we talking about (my first question was "What do you mean?" for a reason). The conflict I took as the topic of the conversation is generally the direction of change in balance of influence (i.e. status) between partners or potential partners in a relationship from the default established by social status quo.

If you reason in CDT style, then the only effect of increasing your own influence is improvement of your experience in your present relationship. (Incidentally, I don't see how your sex is relevant to the character of this activity, the salient category seems to be simply your own person.) This way of thinking seems to explain your discussion in this thread best (correct me if you were in fact assuming something else).

Alternatively, if we are talking about influencing the social status quo, then from the (narrow) point of view of any potential heterosexual relationship, you win from the improvement in relevant aspects of background status of your own sex. It would be obvious that the result of such shift is beneficial overall only if you focus primarily on egoistic value effects of its consequences, ignoring the effect lowered background status has on all of women (which is huge scope). This is essentially the sense which I assumed in making this comment. (This works the other way as well, i.e. the effect worsened relationship experience would have on all of men.)

The reason the first looks like the second to me is that from TDT perspective even the personal decisions you make in influencing the course of your own relationship, without intentionally meddling with the global status war, have global effects through decisions made by other people for similar reasons. If you decide to pursue greater influence in your own relationship, this allows you to infer that other people would behave similarly, which makes for a greater damage to opposite sex's values than just your partner's.

So even if we make the reasonable assumption that you hold your own immediate preferences in greater value than other people's, and so you'd be inclined to bargain in your own direction, the combination of possibly greater marginal value of improvement for the other sex with nontrivial scope of the decision makes it non-obvious.

The rest rests on the factual and moral questions of who gets how much greater marginal benefit from shifts in the current default status quo influence. There seem to be convincing arguments for both sexes.

Comment author: wedrifid 08 April 2011 03:01:54AM 2 points [-]

Alternatively, if we are talking about influencing the social status quo, then from the (narrow) point of view of any potential heterosexual relationship, you win from the improvement in relevant aspects of background status of your own sex

This is true to the extent that status is your criteria of winning. But while status is an extremely good indicator of what we will act like we wish to maximize it is not always what most satisfies our preferences. In the case of sex, for example, higher relative status tends to reduce interest in sex and makes orgasm more difficult to achieve. (Citation needed - anyone recall the studies in question? Likely also an OB post.)

Comment author: Marius 08 April 2011 02:55:29PM 1 point [-]

The background status is not uniform. When females made progress in terms of ability to be seen as good employees/employers, it reduced the relative status of certain male employers/employees, but also increased the relative status of male stay-at-home husbands.

Even in the status game, it doesn't break down on strict gender lines.

When other factors are looked at, the divisions are even less gender-based. If we have a more formal vs less formal consent process, the winners and losers are probably nearly-evenly divided male/female.

Comment author: wedrifid 08 April 2011 03:09:58PM 1 point [-]

Even in the status game, it doesn't break down on strict gender lines.

In fact breaking down on strict gender lines is more of an exception than a rule. It is status relative to the others within the same gender that is the most valuable resource.

Comment author: Marius 08 April 2011 03:17:34PM 0 points [-]

Yes, I very much agree with this. Changing the status of males vs females is unlikely to change my life much at all. Few (if any) people are likely to change sexual orientation due to that kind of status; the effects on promotion/pay are greatly overemphasized. In contrast, changing the status of various professions, or taking certain people out of the dating pool is extremely relevant.

In third-world countries there is more at stake, of course.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 07 April 2011 05:23:26PM 4 points [-]

So, just to unpack this a bit... looking at your comment at the top of this thread, I infer that the sides are "the user of pickup" and "the victim," and I presume that the user is male and the victim female, and I infer therefore that I (being male) gain a benefit from the user of pickup winning (which I presume means having sex) but no benefit from the victim of pickup winning (which I presume means not having sex).

Did I get that right?

Can you clarify what benefit it is that I'm getting here?

If it matters: I'm fairly certain that all my female sexual partners were setting out to have sex, I'm not quite so certain of that for all of my male sexual partners, and in any case I'm fairly certain of it for all of my partners in the last 15 years or so.

Comment deleted 07 April 2011 05:34:19PM * [-]

Comment author: TheOtherDave 07 April 2011 05:54:10PM * 0 points [-]

Actually, I quite deliberately didn't argue anything, because I wasn't even sure that I understood what claim you were making.

Instead, I attempted to make my inferences explicit, asked for confirmation, and asked for clarification on the piece that remained unclear to me. (I'd still sort of like those things.)

So it's not surprising that you can't figure out what I'm arguing with, though it's a little puzzling that you assumed I was arguing with anything at all. Re-reading my comment I'm not sure where you got that idea from.

Anyway: I agree that the willingness of my partners doesn't change whether I like sex more than no-sex or vice-versa.

And I'm not sure why it matters, but just to be clear: if I take "I like X more than Y" in a situation to mean that I estimate that I prefer the actual X in that situation to the counterfactual Y, then I've had sex I liked more than no-sex, I've had sex I liked less than no-sex, I've had no-sex I liked more than sex, and I've had no-sex I liked less than sex.

Edit: Um. Apparently the comment I was replying to got deleted while I was replying to it. Never mind, then?

Comment author: cousin_it 07 April 2011 06:01:39PM * 2 points [-]

Sorry, I deleted my comment for approximately the same reasons that you listed here. I often say stupid things and then desperately try to clean them up.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 07 April 2011 06:17:18PM 3 points [-]

(grin) No worries. I just leave my desperately stupid things out there; I figure in the glorious future when I stop saying stupid things, the contrast will be all the more striking.

Comment author: Perplexed 07 April 2011 05:51:23PM 0 points [-]

I infer that the sides are "the user of pickup" and "the victim,"

That makes no sense in this context (as established by Nancy's first mention of sides and cousin_it's response.) The sides are "those who condemn (so as to discourage) the use of pickup" and "those who see nothing wrong with pickup". With those definitions of the sides, ones sex definitely does not determine which side one is on, but it does have an influence. And "winning" in this war takes the form of marshaling arguments that convince the soldiers of the other side to defect.

Comment author: taryneast 08 April 2011 02:36:18PM * 2 points [-]

The sides are "those who condemn (so as to discourage) the use of pickup" and "those who see nothing wrong with pickup".

Forgive me, but this is the fallacy of the excluded middle (it's possible you do not ascribe to there being just two sides, but you are unclear on this point).

The "sides" as I see it also include, at the very least:

"those who condemn certain common practices of pickup that deliberately harm other people, but are fine with (or even encourage) other practices that are not"

Comment author: TheOtherDave 07 April 2011 06:00:17PM 1 point [-]

You may be right... the reason I made my inferences explicit was precisely so that we can be clear about this stuff, rather than move forward as if we were talking about the same thing when we aren't.

That said, I was responding to the sentence: "The goal of pickup is to engineer the most desirable outcome for the user of pickup, not the most desirable outcome for the victim," which seemed to be what Nancy was responding to.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 07 April 2011 04:27:12PM * 4 points [-]

It's actually an interesting question-- to what extent it's a war between the obvious interest groups and to what extent it's a conflict between people who are relatively willing to cooperate and those who are relatively willing to defect.

Comment author: wedrifid 07 April 2011 05:35:20PM * 0 points [-]

It's actually an interesting question-- to what extent it's a war between the obvious interest groups and to what extent it's a conflict between people who are relatively willing to cooperate and those who are relatively willing to defect.

I've got a sneaking suspicion that I would come to the direct opposite conclusion about which 'side' is 'defecting' and which is trying to cooperate.

I would also disagree with you regarding what the sides are. There are people who have a gender focussed side, there are people who fight for there not to be sides at all and there are people who think 'if you are not with us you are against us'. The people in the middle, as is often the case, get caught in the crossfire.

Comment deleted 07 April 2011 05:27:17PM * [-]

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 07 April 2011 05:31:33PM * 12 points [-]

The worst thing you can do while considering a politically-colored question is make political statements, like declaring a side. It's more productive to strive to consider such questions as intellectual curiosities, ignoring the political impact of the discussion itself, even if you do have a clear side associated with huge stakes or affect. Otherwise, the arguments will more often be chosen for reasons other than their truth and relevance.

Comment author: Nornagest 07 April 2011 05:58:29PM * 9 points [-]

I think you just neatly encapsulated why I cringe a little whenever I see the pickup controversy rearing its head. I strongly agree -- but gender relations seem like about the hardest possible topic to approach as an intellectual curiosity, if the track record of LW and (especially) OB is anything to go by.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 07 April 2011 07:53:02PM * 4 points [-]

I believe I can reliably approach absolutely anything as an intellectual curiosity, and I don't believe I'm so much of a mutant that this skill is not reproducible.

(This mode does slip sometimes, and I do need to focus, so it's not purely a character trait. When it slips, I produce thoughts that I judge on reflection slightly to significantly incorrect.)

Comment author: TheOtherDave 07 April 2011 09:47:05PM 1 point [-]

Oh, there are many more difficult. Gender relations are just a difficult one that comes up.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 08 April 2011 08:43:22AM * 4 points [-]

Oh, there are many more difficult.

In the mainstream discourse it's undoubtedly so, but on LW, I'm not so sure. On many occasions, I've seen people here make comments about topics that are seen as even more inflammatory or outlandish in respectable mainstream circles, only to get calm, rational, and well-argued responses. Certainly I can't think of any topics that are such a reliable discourse-destroyer on LW as the gender relations/PUA issues. I find it a fascinating question why this is so.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 08 April 2011 02:09:20PM 2 points [-]

So, I think about race relations, as a somewhat obvious example.

The impression I've gotten is not that LW is capable of an advanced discussion of race relations but not of gender relations, but rather that race relations simply don't come up in conversation as often as gender relations do. (Which isn't too surprising, given how much more fundamental gender-marking is to our language than race-marking. )

But perhaps I'm not giving the community enough credit. If there have been valuable discussions here about race relations, I'd be interested to read them... pointers are welcomed.

Comment author: Nornagest 07 April 2011 10:03:31PM * 0 points [-]

Point taken. Its representation here is probably better explained by calling it one of the more difficult ones that we don't have a taboo against discussing, although it's definitely high up on my canonical list of mind-killing subjects outside of LW as well.

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